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Lots of Loops

A large group of active regions on the Sun presented us with the chance to show many different magnetic loops over them in just over two-day period (Mar. 4-6, 2014). The loops are made visible to us in extreme ultraviolet light because of charged particles spiraling along the field lines. The occasional lurches in imaging were produced when the Earth came between our spacecraft and the Sun and upset our pointing. Those passages, which lasted about an hour each time, were deleted from this movie sequence. Credit: Solar Dynamics Observatory/NASA.